Ready to expand your international dining credentials again? If you’re following Matt and Cat’s advice you’ll have recently enjoyed some Sri Lankan cuisine in Ryde, Asian flavours at the Smoking Lobster Cowes, and now you can add Filipino food from Newport to your Island eating-out repertoire. Kusina Restobar is... Read more
It’s been an age since we had one of those dinners in which each course delights and confounds our expectations. However, we knew that if we were going to experience food like that anywhere again, then it would be at Ventnor’s Royal Hotel – location of so many memorable... Read more
Aside from the Bitesize donut kiosk in Newport, Drunken Lobster must be a candidate for the Isle of Wight’s smallest eatery. Back when it was El Toro Contento, about a third of the bistro was taken up with a kitchen, and not an inconsiderable amount of space on the... Read more
Somehow, Shanklin has escaped the worst ravages the grim reaper has visited upon the hotels of Sandown. One can still stroll down leafy Queen’s Road and take one’s pick from little family-run guesthouses, boutique hotels, and bed-and-breakfasts. Sure, the inevitable blocks of flats have cropped up; but Shanklin of... Read more
We are often asked ‘Where is the best place on the Island to go for seafood?’. This is a very popular question, particularly of summer visitors, who seem to imagine that the Isle of Wight should have its equivalent of Rick Stein, Padstow’s dominant fish peddler. Years ago we... Read more
It’s been a while. Let’s be honest and say that when we last visited Morrison’s cafe in Newport, our experience was memorable, and the subsequent review involved the words ‘horrible’, and ‘groll’. So it took fourteen years before we worked up the courage to try it again. Needing a... Read more
The distinction between street food and takeaway could simply be semantics. By literal definition, a takeaway is eaten away from its place of origin – perhaps your home or car. Whereas street food is consumed… well, on the street, alongside where it was created, whether that’s a hot dog... Read more
When we started writing our eating out guide, the main thrust (apart from making our dining experiences more diverse) was to help people make informed choices about where to spend their hard-earned. Nobody wants to waste money on a poor or indifferent meal. Nothing worse than forking out for... Read more
Matt can trace his own love of eating out back to his parents, who bravely managed to take their offspring to enough dining-out venues that some vague idea of how to behave therein was instilled in them – no mean feat in the 1970s and 80s when children in... Read more